If you follow us on Twitter, you’ll notice that I put a call out earlier today for people who’d benchmarked their Raspberry Pi 2 – I wanted to be able to share some benchmarking results with you this afternoon.

@Raspberry_Pi I’ve been running the Octane javascript benchmark on Node.JS and getting ~6X faster on the ‘2 (and it’s single threaded!)

Our old friend Dave Hunt (click on that link – it’ll take you to some of Dave’s projects, which are among the most beautiful we’ve seen made with a Raspberry Pi) has done some thorough benchmarking against a range of other devices. Click on the table to learn more and to see some very illuminating graphs.

The good folks at Adafruit have also been busy benchmarking, this time against the B+, and they also found themselves coming up with some really impressive results (a 7x improvement in some cases); click on the image to learn more.

Finally, here’s a really nice side-by-side comparison of the browser experience of the old B+ and a shiny new Pi 2. I recognise that second website Marco Barisione visits.

I wish to complain about the 2B as my coffee consumption is taking a hit because you’ve made it too fast. I used to be able to brew 20fl.oz. of coffee in the time it took to compile GnuCOBOL as it’s normally take about 16 to 18 minutes to rebuild from scratch & perform all the unittests Now it takes between about 5 minutes. and even less if i only do recheck of the unittests. That really isn’t enough time to a fresh coffee and i haven’t been able to make a sandwich to go with it in days.

PLEASE make all future models much slower please. my caffeine levels are plummetting

There is nothing in NuScratch that is ‘over specialized for the model B’. The broadcasts are done via perfectly normal socket APIs, so any change in performance there will be down to lower level changes. I’m sure we’ll find out soon.

This ‘slow test’ is a complete internal ‘broadcast’ test, no scratch sensor network involved. Of course I did another test involving remote socket connections, showing similiar results. Looks as if scratch internal broadcast system is affected. I’ll post the code in the the forum.
Regards, Gerhard

Are you sure you are not stalling waiting on responses for expected time/duration of work? If the procedure (for example) takes 10ms and the pi2 is working in 6ms, but stalls for 18 to catch up to when you expect a response?

I haven’t created any complicated code within Scratch, but if nothing else the Scratch user interface is much faster. I ran a 10 week CodeClub running Scratch on the original Raspberry Pi and whilst usable I did have to tell the children to be patient when there was a delay between them clicking and Scratch responding.

I ran Scratch on my Pi 2 and my son’s Pi B+ and there was a noticeable delay in response from the GUI when creating a program on the old B+, but it was pretty much instant on the Pi 2. This is a big improvement and makes the Raspberry Pi much better.

This has interesting ramifications for the Foundation’s stop-frame animation tutorial I’m planning for Cotswold Raspberry Jam (next event probably Sat 18 April). When my daughter Annabel did the stop-frame tutorial at Pycon, time limitations of the Jam required her to use Ben’s Intel laptop to render the .JPG frames into a video file, because the Pi 1 would take about 2 minutes per frame to render – it wouldn’t have been finished by the time the Jam finished. With the Pi 2’s performance, it looks like this will be practical to render on the Pi 2 itself, live during the event.

This is really a desktop machine now .. just amazing! the browser is so usable …
I ran the wolfram mark system comparison …had some licensing issues at first but then rebooted and it finally worked .. this is from the jan 2015 raspian distro..
raspberrypi2 0.05
Linux ARM (32-bit)

Looking at the Mathematica benchmark’s it appears for some tests, such as test 9, that the pi2 is 21 times faster. The is the kind of speed up one would expect between software float and hardware float. Is it possible Mathematica on the original PI is not making use of hardware float? Alternatively this could be a low memory swap issue. Any idea which? The memory issue can’t be fixed, but hardware float on the original PI is certainly possible.

Since some people have stated that this new version of the Pi migh be adequate as a replacement for a desktop system for those who can’t afford one it would be interesting to see a comparison (as crazy as that might appear) between the Pi2 and say a Pentium 4, C2D, Core Quad, both in benchmarks and real life usage (word processing, spreadsheets, photo editing) – no expectations here, just curiosity. I’d do the comparisons myself, but I don’t have a Core Quad based Pc. And it’ll be long before I get a Pi2 (unless someone wants to donate lne to science

I was going to ask about OpenCV. That’s an amazing improvement, I assume that it improves things for the operation of OpenCV a as well. It’ll be really awesome to improve the vision analyses abilities and have more robotic eyes!

I’m guessing that big speedups in compiling large projects has something to do with memory size, as well as the CPU. If you have to use a swap file on flash due to 512MB memory limit, it has a big impact.

Not really a benchmark, but OpenArena runs at a solid 60 fps on the new pi! Tremulous 1.0.2 too! Haven’t tried Quake3 yet but it should also play smooth as butter.
View in 1080p60 or 720p60 for best experience:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qJB64gn6Mo

I may, or may not, have discovered the wonderessness of time mismanagement for resources when playing this game at university. Especially on the ‘Oh, it will be a quick game’ at 9PM, and I’m still playing at 6am….

So the only benchmarking I can do is comparing how long it took to get an original Pi versus how long it’s taking to get a Pi 2. So far the Pi2 is about 12x faster at getting from launch to my front door. Impressive improvement

Got My Pi2 tonight … LOVE it! But … Worth mentioning that much of the software/distros are in alpha or beta so that although Pi2 is MUCH faster it’s a little less stable than the B+ which is pretty rock solid. .. openelec I’m testing is only 2 days old … Great Pi which will get greater with development! Thankyou!!!

I´d really like to know if there´s a big difference when using Openelec. I´ve been using it for some weeks now on a B+ without overclocking and it feels fast enough – I don´t have a huge video library I must say, all I do is watch some videos stored on an external HD and some stuff off youtube, so the GUI for me is pretty responsive, but maybe if I had a bigger library the B+ “limitations” would appear more obvious.

Hi Tzarls ! Actually I’ve been running Openelec since getting my first Pi (B 264mb ram) With no problems .. We use a B+ because of the four usb ports not because the old pi struggled. I’m hoping the Pi2 will be able to handle more plugins and addons I’m testing OpenELEC-RPi2.arm-5.0.1.img .. the Wireless Networking seams a little aggressive/fast/glitchy? but aside from that .. Ram usage is around 9% the cores arent even trying … installing addons is now instant. rss feeds are smooth as silk .. I’ll try some more tests tomorrow! (I’m not planning to replace my B+ yet!) pete

I am noticing a big difference on emulation like the Amiga and Super Nintendo. Now they run smooth and there is not a stutter in sight. This is great work for anyone who wants to make a gaming cab and what a small form factor with low power.

Our STEM club were well chuffed with the Pi, and set up a quick, if arbitrary benchmark within minecraft using 5x5x5 cube of TNT. We recorded a youtube video of a Pi2 and a B+ side by side.
Result: The Pi B+ is roughly twice as fast to calculate the effect of the explosion of the TNT block!

The strength of the Cray was in floating point performance, hitting 1.9GFLOPS. The GPU in the original 700MHz Pi was clocked at 24GFLOPS. But ignoring the GPU, the ARM core at 900MHz should run to at least 0.05 GFLOPS, and you’ve got four of those in a Pi2, running to 0.2 GFLOPS with a trailing wind. To beat the Cray you’d need an array of a dozen Pi’s which would set you back over $500 – but that’s a lot less than the $16 million you’d need for a Cray-2 in 1985; and back then, $16 million was a lot of money.

The Cray did look awesome though.

VAX-11/780 was the engineer’s choice of minicomputer – much like the Pi today perhaps. However with only a single 5MHz CPU and a maximum of 8MB RAM (that’s MegaByte, not GigaByte, kids) I think the Pi would run rings around the old beast. The VAX would win if it was a sumo competition of course – the CPU cabinets alone weigh in around a metric tonne.

SGI were sold as graphics workstations but I suspect that by today’s standards even their highly-tuned graphics subsystems would be outperformed by the GPU in the Pi. The baby O2 (single 400MHz CPU and 1GB RAM) wouldn’t scare the Pi2 but the bigger Octanes with dual 600MHz MIPS processors and 8GB RAM might give the Pi a black eye. But side-by-side? the graphics on the Pi would outshine what were the best of the 1990’s desktops.

The SPARCstation 20 seemed great at the time. It could support quad RISC processors, but only at 200MHz, so round 1 to the Pi2. Maximum memory? 512MB. Round 2, Pi2. Built-in Ethernet? 10Mbps only. Round 3, Pi2. Graphics? Knockout blow by the Pi2. With a full spec SS20 costing well over $20k back in 1995, it’s an easy win for Raspberry Pi.

Computing is an area where the products get old, fast. I have a collection of old machines (including small VAXen and SPARC hardware) but it’s hardly worth the electricity to turn them on nowadays. They deserve to be preserved as they are part of our journey but we have come a long, long way in one human lifetime.

My first computing experience was playing Lunar Lander on the GT40 front-end processor of a DECsystem-10 in about 1975. I can’t begin to guess how much that configuration cost! Anyways, if the Pi can deliver the same magical experience to a whole generation of budding computer scientists, programmers and designers then I’d say the Pi wins hands down.

You owned a VAX? I’m impressed. I owned a PDP-11/03. Lovely machine. It was actually a Heathkit H11 and I assembled the power supply, backplane and case myself. The architecture was so simple that you could program it in assembler and feel like you were doing magic. An emulator on the Pi would run many times faster than the real thing. 64k of RAM fully stacked (for an outrageous amount of moolah), and I had 2 x DSD440 (RX-02 lookalike) disk drives for a whole 1Mb of floppy disk! Those were the days.

I would like to see the I/O system benchmarked. How limited is the combined USB-Ethernet bus?

Early benchmarks
1) On the hard drive side, running hdparm -t /dev/sda1, and getting almost exactly 30MB/s or 240Mb/s !!!
2) On the network side, the internal 100Mb/s Ethernet has already maxed out at greater than 90Mb/s speeds.

Benchmarks that I would like to see:

One way bandwidth
1) dd a large file on a fast USB flash drive, to /dev/null, and time it.
2) Connect a USB Gigabit LAN adapter to the RPi2, and connect the LAN to a PC. Run iperf on both the PC and RPi2.

Throughput
1) dd a file on a fast USB flash drive, to another fast flash drive.
2) Install 2 USB Gigabit LAN adapters on the RPi2, and setup a network bridge between them. Connect the LAN to two PCs, and run iperf on both PCs.
3) Setup a Samba share using a fast USB flash drive through a USB Gigabit LAN adapter.

The Einstein@Home benchmarks are a bit confusing and/or disappointing. The Pi 2 comes up only a tad faster than the Pi 1 (basically about the ratio of the clock frequencies). This could be because they are per-core benchmarks, in which case I should get 4+ times the throughput in the long run, or it could be because the cores are sharing the integer and floating poiint units (which would seem a bit pointless). I haven’t yet done enough E@H work on the Pi 2 to get a throughput score. It will take a day or two. I’ll post an update when the picture is clearer.

Hi,
I tried a very unscientific test of running my version of Life. It calculates an area of 704 X 450 and wraps at the edges, I did a timing run for 9000 generations.
Both Pies were set to the came cpu, core and clock speeds, with no X running, and as far as I’m aware only a single CPU was used on the Pi 2.
On a Raspberry Pi B it completes 9000 generations in 20 seconds.
On a Raspberry Pi 2 it completes 9000 generations in 7 seconds!
This seems surprisingly good as it’s exactly the same code, which I had optimised as much as I could, with exactly the same CPU frequencies, I can only think that because of the larger internal cache, the whole of the program plus array storage can fit in the Pi 2 cache and it couldn’t in the Pi B. Obviously it still has to slow down to do the screen updates, which presumably will have to be in main memory.
While I’m on the subject, I used ‘cc -O2 life.c’ to compile this, can anyone tell me if there are any better options I can use for the Pi 2 as it’s an ARM 7?
Thanks, Kevin Moore.

Guys – I have very slow video playback (tested on Buck Bunny 1080p) on rpi2 using both openelec and OSMC. About 10 fps with acceleration on (cores about 10-15% of load and 0% of vpu), when I switch off acceleration fps drops even lower (more cpu usage, and no vpu load). Any ideas?

I would have jumped at getting one already, but it’s just a small bored with everything on it, and i don’t have the tools needed to make a casing for it, i wish i did.. but i don’t.
REALLY wish i had a 3D printer.

A quick google search will show you that there are dozens of 3rd-party cases available to buy for the Raspberry Pi. Thanks to the same form-factor (almost) every case for the Pi B+ will also fit the Pi 2.

I’ll probably get laughed off the comments for posting this (because it’s not exactly a benchmark) but I remember Fibrelamp on xscreensaver when the Pi launched – probably one frame every 3 seconds; it’s performance gradually increased with all the hard work you guys did with code / OS optimisation over the R-Pi-1 era. It will come as no surprise to hear it’s all Kerry Gold in the frame-rate department on R-Pi-2. :-)

Seriously though, the Raspberry Pi 2 is *utterly butterly* – this machine is a game changer for you and Planet Earth and I just know that you’re going to sell zillions of them! :-) I can’t wait to see how it evolves in hard/soft-ware over time … congratulations to everyone on the R-Pi team! :-)

Got my Pi2 on Saturday and did this test:
1) Created a simple python script to calculate the first 50 Fibonacci numbers. I do this 1000 times and then print out the average duration of the 50 calculations.
2) I then loaded this script onto my B+ and my Pi2
3) Opened up 4 SSH shells into each of the above RPIs and launched the script from the command line
4) Observed that the B+ calculation time got slower and slower as I added SSH sessions while the Pi2 seemed unaffected.
5) Final values: B+ .00844, Pi2 .00138 -> 4:53:1 performance improvement for the Pi2.
6) Note that when I added a fifth SSH session to the Pi2 and ran the script, the timings finally took a hit. So I think it’s safe to say that those four cores make a difference.

I’ve posted a detailed comment on the forum about the performance improvement I noticed when using a testbench for an in-memory database – see http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=689575#p689575. Basically, without any recompilation or over-clocking, I saw 4-fold performance improvement for single-threaded sets, and 6 to 8 times better when using multiple connections to the server.

Well the CPU performance is nice: but I guess there is a problem with the GPIOs. Using file system IO access is approx 20 times slower than on my RPi1 models. And trying to access /dev/mem simply ends in a memory exception, The pigpio and other libraries show similar problems…

So the Pi2 was about 4.8x faster than the Pi, but there is still a big gap to the desktop computer. The two Pi’s were not using the same SD card, but I think most of the difference is CPU rather than ‘disk’ performance.
Python2 ran from the IDLE. No multi-threading in the script.

I should have said that the old Raspberry Pi was a model B with 512 MB of RAM. When I repeated the test on the Pi using the same memory card as the Pi2 had used, the elapsed time was 202.5 seconds reducing the Pi2 to 4.6x the Pi.

Sounds like the tests are only using one core. In which case 1.3-2.2 sounds about right. With the right software running on 4 cores, I have seen code speed increase by x30 for x264 encode. So it is very dependant on what you are doing (which is why most benchmarks are not that important)

Could somebody take timelapse photos of the Pi camera on the Raspberry Pi 2 model B and give me the smallest number between 2 shots without the delay? In Raspberry Pi 1 mode l B+, I need at least 1.7s between 2 continuous shots.

my experience over model B+ and pi 2
i’ve used B+ before with my sdl2 program :
animation , bunch of texture and other think
B+ work well :5 to 7 fps quite good for me and my application.
Model pi 2 coming with a lot of improvement
so i think with pi 2 my program get well.
WRONG
the same program run quite 7 times slow
i’ve noticed that program slow
with function that have to move lot memory
like
SDL_RenderCopy
on the other side SDL_SetRenderDrawColor running faster
but i use lot of first function
question is how i run my program at least at same speed of previous B+
ps with overclock run little bit faster but not so much
advice and comment are welcome
(forgive my english)

It would be nice to have some kind of standard benchmark for testing SD and microSD cards inside the Raspberry Pi itself. There are many methods around the net… we need a standard one so we can compare.

Has anyone run RISCOS Pi on the Raspberry Pi 2? I’d like to know what people think of it, vs. that OS running on the Raspberry Pi 1. How much more responsive is desktop performance (window moves as well as resizing, opening/closing, etc.) and other aspects, including Web Browsing?